German election software could be easily hacked, experts warn

IT experts have found security flaws in a software program used to collect votes in the German election, newspaper Die Zeit reported Thursday.

The software, PC-Wahl, calls itself the "most widely used voting organization system" in Germany, and is used to collect and transfer votes from local polling centers to the state level. By law, voting in Germany must be done by paper ballot and is first counted by hand, but software like PC-Wahl is often used to transmit the data. As the votes are counted at a local level, the software used differs from state to state, according to Spiegel.

But 29-year-old IT student Martin Tschirsich and European hacker group Chaos Computer Club (CCC) found security holes in the PC-Wahl software that could be manipulated.

"The possibility of attacks and the significance of the security gaps in this program exceeded all our expectations," a spokesperson for Chaos Computer Club said in a statement.

The developer of PC-Wahl, Volker Berninger, defended the product: "In the worst case scenario, it could cause confusion. Then we would have wrong results on the internet, but on paper we would still have the correct ones. Of course, that leads to anger and confusion, but has no relevance."

Dieter Sarreither, who is in charge of supervising the September 24 election, told Spiegel the chance of preliminary results being manipulated is "extremely unlikely," and the chance of the final results being altered is "not possible."

Tschirsich himself also admitted: "If the correct results were manipulated, it would immediately be noticed."

The federal election office said it has alerted regional election authorities to the software problems, asking them to take additional security precautions, such as verifying the software data by phone. The election office also said that the program will be updated by the time of the election.